How do people go about updating dreamweaver templates. I just constructed a new site and would like to bring my local version of the site home with me to work on but... If I update the local version of the template and it in turn updates the local version of the instances, I'm afraid that when I finally upload the changes to the server, some of my web development team members might loose any updates to the instances of the templates they made. Is there a way to update the local version of the templates and then have it in turn update the server instances?

Short answer, no- template updates simply update local copies of the child pages, and then you upload those changes to your remote server.

The best way to manage this within Dreamweaver is to enable check-in/check-out (in your site definitions) for everyone in your workgroup, as otherwise there's no way to make sure that others editing the same resources won't collide with your changes. This is a common snafu in distributed workgroups, FWIW.

Outside of that, you may want to consider setting up a more comprehensive version control system such as CVS that will allow you more flexibility in these cases- DW's check-in/check-out functionality is very basic and doesn't allow you to diff/merge versions of individual files, it simply tries to stop other users from editing files that you've checked out.

Hope this helps!

- Scott

scott fegette
macromedia, inc.